Lisa De Bode's Al Jazeera article about a young Belgian man who joined ISIL and returned is very compelling reading.

If the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant preaches the truth, why do most Muslims oppose it? “Because most Muslims go to hell,” answered the young man wearing a black hoodie adorned with a Kalashnikov and ISIL’s logo. “The hadith ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes a project aimed at crowdsourcing money to buy sleeping bags for Toronto's homeless.
• Gerry Canavan despairs at the corporatization of the University of Wisconsin.
• Centauri Dreams takes another look at Kepler-444.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting no correlation between the sizes of Kuiper belts and exoplanets.
• The Dragon's Tales ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov describe how Russia is trying to use the Charlie Hebdo attacks to reset its relations with the European Union.

France’s worst terror attacks in more than half a century show the need for “urgent” cooperation between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, Russia’s top diplomat said ( Read more... )

• 3 Quarks Daily's S. Abbas Raza argues that the Charlie Hebdo shooting is one element of the issues of many in the Muslim world with their neighbours, something that gets mainly Muslim victims.
• Al Jazeera's Massoud Hayoun reports on fears among Muslims tht the Charlie Hebdo shootings might lead to a collapse in communal relations, while Arthur ( Read more... )

If there was a single essay on today's massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo I would recommend to my readers, it is Juan Cole's essay. Al-Qaeda wants the world to react with anti-Muslim hate, the better to find footsoldiers and support. Don't let them win.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, ( Read more... )

At Al Jazeera, Miroslav Zafirov makes the reasonable point that ISIS exists substantially because of support lent to Sunni Islamic radicals under Saddam Hussein's regime. (Substantially, not entirely, not mostly.)

In 1986, at a meeting with representatives of the pan-Arab national command - the supreme ideological body of the Baath Party - Saddam ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams notes a study of exoplanet environments suggests that Earth-like planets with extreme axial tilts like Uranus could remain habitable, so long as they have sufficiently large and deep oceans.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that exoplanet Fomalhaut b is actually a misidentified dust cloud from a Kuiper belt collision.
• The ( Read more... )

• Al Jazeera notes Syrian refugee resettlement in Germany, the cultural importance of jewelry design to the Navajo, the complicated ethics of separatism in South Yemen, concerns over the Islamic State in the Arab Gulf and in the North Caucasus, a massacre of Christians by Somali militias in northern Kenya, the localization of Google in Irish, and a ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera America's Joseph Dana notes how Erdogan's effort to reintroduce the old Ottoman Turkish language, written with a different vocabulary and in Arabic, gets to the heart of Turkey's culture wars.

With his vociferous call on Monday to elevate an older form of Turkish in the national school curriculum, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is ( Read more... )

Quickly looking at the news of John Maguire, the Ottawa-area man who has shot to fame as encouraging terrorist attacks in Canada on behalf of ISIS, Sarah Boesveld and Sam Cooley's Ottawa Citizen article "Path of a jihadi: How John Maguire went from a high school joker in Kemptville to an Islamic radical" provides as good an overview of his early ( Read more... )